


Further Still

by siirius



Series: So Far & Related Stories [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Number Twelve Grimmauld Place, but it's from harry's POV, this is a companion piece to So Far
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:42:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26973856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/siirius/pseuds/siirius
Summary: August 1995, Number 12, Grimmauld Place: Sirius, surrounded by the ghosts of his past and at the request of his godson, speaks, for the last time, of the girl he once loved. "Her name was Charlotte…"
Series: So Far & Related Stories [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1968445
Kudos: 9





	Further Still

**Author's Note:**

> This story takes place many years after the events of So Far. If you have any interest in reading So Far, I would recommend that you do not read this first, as it will spoil the ending for you. If you do not have any interest in reading So Far, by all means, please feel free to read! I just don't know that it will necessarily mean anything to you.
> 
> One more warning: I would not say that this is a happy story.
> 
> Still, I hope you enjoy!

It was almost time for the start of term at Hogwarts, and there were still rooms to be cleaned.

Harry, along with Ron, Hermione, and Ginny, was helping Sirius and Remus tidy up a spare bedroom while Mrs. Weasley fixed them all supper. The room, which appeared to have been abandoned for even longer than the rest of the wretched building, was luckily devoid of any cursed artefacts. Whoever had gone to such lengths to scare away intruders clearly hadn't bothered to reach this far corner of the third floor.

Still, everything from the desk to the four-poster to the wardrobe was coated in filth older than Harry. The five of them had their work cut out for them.

With some trepidation, Harry plunged his hand between the mattress and the nightstand to sweep for dust balls. Instead, his fingers swept across something round, bulbous and slightly wet. Disgusted, and a little afraid of whatever it was he had just touched, he quickly retracted his hand and examined it, lip curled. Rather than push the nightstand away to take a look, however, he decided he had earned a break. He sat back on the dusty mattress with a huff and looked around at the others.

Ron was half-heartedly scrubbing a window with an already blackened rag. Hermione and Ginny were wrestling with the wardrobe door, trying to pry it open. Harry's eyes landed on Sirius, who was standing on his toes to sweep cobwebs off of the ceiling.

Sirius's sleeve had slipped. Underneath, there was a brown, weather-beaten bracelet, loose on his slender wrist. Scratched into the surface of a rusted metal band were two words Harry couldn't read from so far away.

"Hey, Sirius," Harry called. Sirius turned, looking grateful for a distraction. "What's your wristband say?"

"Oh." Sirius averted his eyes. "It says, er, 'Mischief Managed.'"

"That's wicked!" exclaimed Harry. "Did you all have one of those?" he asked excitedly, already imagining an identical wristband on his father's arm.

Remus, he noticed, had picked his head up and looked at Sirius from the far corner of the room. His expression, if Harry wasn't mistaken, betrayed a long latent sadness.

"Er, no." Sirius looked immensely uncomfortable, and he yanked his sleeve down over his wrist. "Just me. I've got the only one."

"But why-" Harry started to ask, but he stopped when he caught Remus's eye. Remus definitely looked downcast now, and he was glancing towards Sirius with what was unmistakably pity. The others had grown interested now, and they had all paused what they were doing to look towards Sirius and Harry. Sirius, noticing this as well, looked around at all of them before sighing deeply.

"It was a gift," he explained, "from a girlfriend I once had."

Hermione and Ginny exchanged looks, and Ron perked up his ears as well. Harry thought quickly; he wanted to know more, but, judging by the pained expression on Sirius's face, whatever had happened with this girlfriend was likely much more than a simple break up.

"What was her name?" he asked after a moment's hesitation. Sirius blinked at him, his thoughts unreadable. For a second, Harry thought he wasn't going to respond.

"Her name was Charlotte," he said finally. "We were at Hogwarts together. You can ask Moony, too. They were close."

Remus, who was now rushing forward to be by Sirius's side, nodded glumly. "Charlotte was lovely."

"Do you have a photograph anywhere?" Harry pressed curiously, as gently as he could.

Sirius again looked like he had not expected such a question. His hand trembling slightly, he reached into the pocket of his trousers and extracted a photo that had been folded into quarters. He passed it to Harry, who certainly hadn't thought that Sirius would have a picture so readily available. He accepted it with a raise of his eyebrows.

He unfolded the photograph, noting that the edges where it was folded were so well-worn it looked as though it could fall apart at any moment. Holding it gingerly, he held it out so the others, who had crowded around to peek over his shoulder, could see.

The picture was clearly taken on the grounds at Hogwarts - Harry recognized a sliver of the Great Lake in the corner - and its inhabitants looked about seventeen. Sirius, with his chin-length dark hair fluttering slightly in the breeze, looked extremely handsome. His face was split into a large, authentic grin, his eyes twinkled happily, and he had one arm thrown over the shoulder of a girl. She was blonde and freckled, with a pretty face, but what struck Harry most was the way she peered up at Sirius. She looked positively exuberant to be squished into his side: her smile was almost dopey with affection, and her eyes, blinking up at Sirius from under long lashes, never left his face. Harry watched as the tiny Sirius turned and scooped up the tiny Charlotte's chin, drawing her in for a kiss and sticking his hand up to shield them from view. He heard Ginny coo behind him.

"What happened to her?" asked Ron, who was not born with the gift of subtlety. Hermione and Ginny both shot him looks, and he shrugged, bewildered by this response.

"None of us really knew. Harry's mother knew more than the rest of us, though," was Sirius's response, much to Harry's surprise. There was a hint of bitterness in his tone now. "Everything she knew died with her."

"They were friends, then?" asked Harry excitedly. He had heard plenty about the Marauders, but never anything about his mother's friends before.

"Oh, yes." Remus was the one to respond this time. "Charlotte trusted Lily more than anyone, and Lily surely loved her in return. You know, if I remember correctly, Charlotte was the first person Lily told when she realized she had fallen for your father.

"Me, of course, being the second," he added with a little smile, "but only because Charlotte accidentally told me."

This news very much excited Harry, but, still trying to be sympathetic to Sirius's apparent turmoil, he restrained himself from asking too many questions at once.

"I'm confused," Ron spoke up. "Is she dead?"

" _Ron_ ," Hermione hissed, elbowing him, hard, in the side. He clutched at his newly bruised waist, looking cross.

"No," said Sirius. "No, she's not dead. She just disappeared."

" _Disappeared_?" Ginny repeated.

Sirius nodded, then pulled the chair out from the desk in the corner and settled into it. He rubbed his eyes with shaky fingers, and Harry was struck by the aura of absolute exhaustion that emanated from him. There was virtually no trace of the carefree boy from the photograph in his hands. The man in the chair was, instead, slumped under the weight of many years' worth of pain.

"In our seventh year, on New Year's Eve, Lily showed up on my doorstep," he began his tale.

Remus leaned against the desk behind him, and the others, eager for the break from cleaning, sat cross-legged on the floor and stared at Sirius with rapt attention. Harry, feeling silly on his feet, followed suit. Sirius peered down at his audience, not looking entirely pleased to be leading this strange story time, but still, he continued.

"It was strange, you see. Charlotte's birthday was the day after Christmas. I had sent her a letter, and gifts, but didn't receive anything in return. I wrote to Moony and to Lily, asking if either of them had heard from her. Rather than responding by owl, Lily decided to pay me a visit.

"Of course, my immediate response was to panic. I thought that surely something terrible must have happened if she couldn't tell me what she had to say in a letter. It didn't help that she looked...distraught. She said, though, that everything was alright, but that Charlotte had asked her to deliver a message."

He paused, then took a deep, shaky breath. Remus squeezed his shoulder reassuringly; Sirius looked at him gratefully, then resumed.

"She explained that Charlotte would not be returning to Hogwarts, and that she had left behind three important pieces of information for me. The first was that she was safe. The second was that I wasn't to go looking for her."

"And the third?" asked Hermione softly, after Sirius had paused again. He closed his eyes.

"The third was that she was breaking up with me."

"That she was breaking up with you but still loved you," Remus corrected quietly and carefully.

"But what do you mean, she was 'safe'?" Harry blurted out before Sirius could respond, his curiosity finally getting the better of him. "Why wouldn't she be safe?"

"And the part about how you couldn't go looking for her," Ginny added, evidently just as confused. "Did you not know where she lived, or did she run away?"

"To answer Ginny's question first-" Sirius sighed "-I've no idea if she ran away from home or not. For all I know, she simply moved in with her parents. They had just moved to France a few months prior. I never knew exactly where.

"To fully answer _your_ question, Harry, would take a novel. To make a long story short, Charlotte and I got ourselves mixed up in some trouble with some soon-to-be Death Eaters. It culminated in a nasty duel between my brother and myself. His friends...they didn't respond too kindly to that. In essence, they spent the former half of our seventh year trying to kill me."

" _What_?" exclaimed Ron and Hermione simultaneously. Ginny went pale, and Harry felt a familiar rage bubble up inside him.

"Yeah, they tried to throw me off of a cursed broomstick."

Harry, Ron, and Hermione exchanged looks: the same thing had happened to Harry during their first year.

"There was also the time they slipped you that potion so you would go running up to the Whomping Willow," said Remus.

"Right." Sirius gave them all a grim smile. "There was that, too."

"So you think Charlotte ran away because she was afraid they'd come after her, too?" asked Ron.

"No," Sirius replied sharply. "Charlotte wasn't a coward."

"Sorry." Ron blushed. "I didn't mean to-"

"It's fine," Sirius interrupted, waving him off. "The thing is, after she left, those Slytherins never bothered me again. I wish they would have. I wanted to curse them all. Oh, Merlin, I wanted to march right up to them and start hexing and jinxing until someone explained to me what she had done."

"Why didn't you?" asked Ginny.

"Believe me, I found it incredibly difficult to hold myself back, but Lily told me I couldn't. She said it wouldn't bring Charlotte back, and that I mustn't do anything stupid or it'd all be for nothing."

" _What_ would all be for nothing?" Harry still didn't understand.

"She made some sort of deal," Hermione whispered. They all looked at her. "Her disappearance in exchange for your safety."

Sirius nodded. "Lily never explicitly said that. I doubt Charlotte even told her, not out loud, but that's the only conclusion to be drawn. I don't know who she talked to, or how, or when. I don't know how she knew it would work, but it's the only thing that makes any sense at all."

"But, but," Ron sputtered, "but that's crazy! She left Hogwarts halfway through her last year? She left all of her friends and...and…"

"It's not crazy," Harry interrupted before Ron could think of anything else to say. "You don't think that, if there was some way I could guarantee you'd all be safe if I left, that I...that I wouldn't…" He trailed off, but nothing more needed to be said. The room went quiet as the weight of Harry's words settled around them. Sirius, in particular, was looking at him curiously.

"She'd be quite fond of you, you know," he said, after they'd all let the thought ruminate. "If she knew you."

"Me?" Harry's eyebrows shot up into his hair.

"Haven't you ever wondered why you have a godfather, but no godmother?" asked Remus.

"I have, but…" Harry frowned, thinking. Slowly, he started to speak. "Mum was saving her spot. It would have been hers. Charlotte would have been my godmother."

Sirius swallowed, unable to say anything at all. Hermione clasped Harry's hand. Harry intertwined his fingers with hers for just a moment before letting go; he didn't feel that he was the one who needed comforting. He looked at Sirius, at his godfather's plagued face, and chose his next words carefully.

"Sirius, what if we...well, I mean, it's been many years since then, and-" he paused to take a breath "-we could look for her, is what I'm trying to say. We could find her and...and bring her here, and you could be together again."

Sirius's chest heaved, but still he didn't say a word. Remus placed another hand on his friend's shoulder and rose to his feet.

"Harry." He sighed, running his other hand through the back of his thin hair. "It's not that easy. For one thing, she probably thinks Sirius is a mass murderer."

"If she ever really loved him, she'll believe us right away when we explain that he's not," said Ginny vehemently.

"For another thing," Remus continued as if she hadn't spoken, "finding someone is a difficult task when you have no idea where they are, and _especially_ if they don't want to be found. I've written to her many times and-"

"I found her," interrupted Sirius, and it was so unexpected that the room became a showcase of knitted eyebrows.

"I beg your pardon?" Remus looked flabbergasted.

"I found her," Sirius repeated. "I was on the run for quite some time, you know. I spent more time than I should have roaming around France, hoping to catch a glimpse of her, and, one day, I did."

"Did _she_ see _you_?" asked Hermione.

"Did you talk to her?" Ron added excitedly.

"Why didn't you _tell_ me?" Remus's eyes were still wide.

"No," Sirius breathed. "She didn't see me, I don't think, and I didn't talk to her."

"But why?" Harry couldn't believe his ears. He didn't know much of anything about love, at least not the romantic kind, but it was clear as day, even to him, that Sirius still loved this woman. He couldn't fathom why he would have let her slip away for a second time.

"She was in a little town called Sarlat-la-Canéda. It was remarkable, really. I was just trotting down a small road, looking for scraps. I hadn't _really_ believed I would find her, but, all of a sudden, there she was. I wasn't the only stray dog on that street, so she didn't even look at me. I watched her for a bit, though, out there in her garden. I was working up the nerve to speak to her, and I almost did it, too, even though I knew how risky it would be."

"But?" Hermione pressed, for they had all heard the unspoken word. Sirius's shoulders sank as he retreated into himself, looking smaller than Harry would have thought possible.

"There was a little girl. She came running out of the house yelling, 'Mummy, mummy!' and I...I just couldn't do that to her. She had escaped all of...this." He gestured vaguely around the room, but they knew exactly what he meant. "I couldn't drag her back into it, not when it meant dragging her daughter into it, too."

There was a heavy moment of silence.

Then, Ginny said, very quietly, "Oh, Sirius." Harry was startled to see tears welling in her eyes. Hermione, too, had a teardrop at the end of her nose. Remus looked down at his toes, and even Ron sighed sadly.

"Her name was Celeste," Sirius said, far too casually. He had turned away from then and was now tracing his finger across the surface of the desk. "The little girl's name was Celeste."

"Celeste, like the sky," said Hermione. "Her daughter's named after the sky, just like you."

Sirius looked over his shoulder and gave her a wobbly little smile that told them this was exactly what he had been hoping to hear.

"Supper's ready!" Mrs. Weasley burst through the door. It was so sudden that they all jumped, and she looked around at their long faces with her hands on her aproned hips. "What's happened to you lot?"

"Molly!" Sirius rearranged his features into a pitiful facsimile of a carefree expression. "I was just telling the young ones here never to fall in love until this war's over."

"Nonsense," Mrs. Weasley scoffed. "It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Now come, before the food gets cold."

They filed dutifully out of the room behind her. Sirius brought up the rear and, as he closed the door behind them, Harry turned to look at him. He was rubbing the bracelet against his wrist, his fingers running knowingly against the letters carved into it.

"Is it?" Harry asked, and Sirius peered up at him, head still ducked.

"Is it what?"

"Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?" As he asked this question, Harry wondered how Molly Weasley knew Tennyson, but he supposed she had lived through the first war, after all. These Muggle words must have meant much more to wizards than they did to the primary school teacher he had learned them from.

Sirius tilted his chin upwards to look at him straight on. His eyes darted across Harry's face, and they were filled with an emotion Harry didn't entirely recognize. It was at this moment that Harry realized how little he really knew about the man in front of him. Sirius sighed, and, surprisingly, he nodded.

"Yeah. Yeah, I suppose it is."

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!


End file.
